


Gifts of the Blood God

by ConstantineXII



Category: Warhammer - All Media Types, Warhammer 40.000, Warhammer 40k (Novels) - Various Authors
Genre: Action, Blood and Violence, Chaos, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:13:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22306252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstantineXII/pseuds/ConstantineXII
Summary: The Imperial Guard has deployed to crush an uprising on a rebellious planet, and Private Mrita Konvalos of the 8th Pireans finds herself on the front lines. She does her part for the Emperor, but after witnessing the horrors of Chaos firsthand, she begins to ask questions--questions that can only lead to heresy.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1: Praise the Four

**Author's Note:**

> Crosspost from FF.net. Enjoy!

Private Mrita Konvalos sat down, exhausted, atop a pile of heretic corpses. Rain hissed on the still-hot barrel of her lasgun.

“Now is not the time to rest, Konvalos!” her sergeant shouted. “On your feet!”

Mrita thought she had earned a break—of the couple dozen heretics lying dead in this trench, she’d killed eight—but there was no arguing with the NCO. She stood, and checked the power pack on her weapon. “Where to now, ma’am?”

“The hill by Samson’s Crossing.” The sergeant, Merce Hetz, marched ahead, and the whole of Third Squad trudged through the muck after her. Six of them remained, in tattered and filthy Cadian-pattern armor, their bayonets dripping blood. “They’ve got a couple of Hydras up there, keep shooting down our air support. But our platoon needs to regroup first.”  


The battlefield was a morass crisscrossed by trenches, where war simmered but did not blaze. Little moved around them—just a few knots of wary Pirean troopers like her, prodding the dead with bayonets, and, further out, rumblings and small firefights where the enemy still resisted. As promised, black-painted and spike-adorned Hydras spat flak atop a hill in the distance. Judging by the shell blasts launching brown-grey plumes around them—Pirean regiments were known for their artillery—those positions probably wouldn’t survive long enough for Third Squad to make any difference.  


So Mrita marched forward, slowly but warily.  


“How many more of these you think we’ll have to clear out?” asked a soldier beside her. Her name was Enthilde, another private, stocky and black-haired where Mrita was a thin redhead.  


“Couldn’t tell you.”  


These trenches had been a bastion of heresy on this world, their denizens now put to rout in the Emperor’s name. To secure that victory, the Eighth Pireans had struggled for a week and died en masse, only prevailing in the last few days’ frenzy of violence.  


“Think His angels will show up and save us the trouble?”  


“Maybe, but there are only so many Astartes—wait a minute.” Mrita held up her hand. She’d noticed a deep shell crater beside the trench, perfect for an ambush. “Cover me, I’m going to check that out.” She climbed over the rim and angled the barrel of her lasgun against any heretics who might lie in wait.  


There was only half of one, it turned out. The damage looked to her like a chainsword cut—ragged but much neater than dismemberment by shell—and had probably been inflicted by the regimental commissar, Vant, who’d spent the battle charging into the thick of things, seemingly immune to bullets. Entrails were scattered everywhere and stank like sin.  


The heretic was unnaturally pale, like all of them, and like most of them he had the eight-pointed star carved into his forehead. A similar star was cast in brass and affixed crudely behind his head like a perverse halo.  


“Ugly bastard, huh?” Enthilde said, coming up to look over Mrita’s shoulder.  


“Extra dedicated, too. Look at these parchments.” Mrita bent low, tugged at a few bloodsoaked scraps of paper hanging from the heretic’s robes. The rain was already washing out rows of disorganized, sloppy text that could not possibly have been Low Gothic. “Might’ve been a witch before our commissar cut him in half.”  


Fear the witch, the priests back home had always said, and suffer it not to live. In the Emperor’s galaxy, the worshipers of false gods got what they deserved.  


Even though it was unclear exactly what they worshiped.  


“What are you two looking at?” called Sergeant Hetz. “We have a schedule to keep, guardsmen!”  


Mrita turned from the body. “Just checking our surroundings, ma’am. The Emperor rewards vigilance.”  


“He also rewards punctuality, so—”  


A torturously high-pitched screech came from… somewhere. Mrita and Enthilde covered their ears, as did the sergeant and her other soldiers, as did the muddy figures of Second Squad fifty paces away.  


“What in the Emperor’s name?” Hetz shouted, nearly inaudible.  


Mrita winced as the sound grew louder, a shriek of agony clawing at her senses. Buried beneath it was a whole chorus of voices speaking gibberish. For moments the torment continued, until the scream cut out and the voices diminished to a mere whisper that made her hair stand on end.  


“Lieutenant Gorivan, Commissar Vant, did any of you hear that?” Hetz tapped the comm-bead in her ear. “Shit. I can’t raise anyone.”  


Mrita glanced over at Second Squad, only to find that they had vanished. Beyond a few meters’ distance there was not a living soul on the battlefield. She blinked, disbelieving, scanning the ruined terrain for any sign of her allies…  


Even the nearby Chimeras had stopped in their tracks.  


“Emperor protect us,” said Enthilde, behind her. “He should be dead.”  


“What?” Mrita turned and saw for herself. In the mud at the bottom of the shell crater, the heretic witch had begun to stir, pulling himself up with his thin, tattooed arms.  


“Chaos comes,” he whispered. “Sorcery and decay, ecstasy and wrath—glorious screaming madness, like you pathetic souls have never seen.”  


Something squelched not far away. Down in the trench was another cultist back from the dead, standing upright even though her chest was a burnt and bloody hole.  


“Praise the Four...” the heretic said. Corporal Maukan blasted her skull apart with a lasbolt, and she still stood.  


“Death to the False Emperor!” shouted a body half-buried under a crushed Munitorum crate.  


“You fools serve a corpse!”  


There were others, Mrita didn’t know how many, mutilated cadavers springing to life from the trenches and the corpse-piles and the endless fields of muck. By her feet, a severed arm pulled its way towards her.  


The witch was doing this. Somehow. Mrita jumped into the crater and stabbed him with her bayonet, repeatedly, as if he were another sack of flour on the training field. He cackled even as the blade pierced his lungs.  


“Do whatever you like!” he said, spitting blood. “Your efforts only feed the true gods!”  


Mrita thrust the bayonet through the back of his mouth, which shut him up. He gurgled and clawed at her rifle with long, grimy fingernails.  


“Praise the Four!” the dead went on. They were everywhere now, in the trench and the wasteland around it, seemingly immune to the cracking lasbolts Enthilde and the others put out.  


“Death to the Corpse Emperor!”  


The impaled witch still thrashed about, his bare fingernails scratching furrows in the side of Mrita’s lasgun. That shouldn’t have been possible.  


“Praise the Four!”  


“Praise Chaos!”  


A dozen voices spoke, inside Mrita’s head: **Praise the Four**.  


She shrieked. Her muscles spasmed, no longer under her control, and half-seen visions assailed her, specters of blood and fiendish desire and crystal cities where the sky was a riotous maelstrom of colors…  


The witch stopped moving. Mrita returned to reality. She withdrew her bayonet, panting, then stabbed him again, and again. When she looked up she saw that the heretics had all collapsed back into the mud.  


“Third Squad,” Hetz said. For a moment she gazed absently past Mrita, then refocused. “Third Squad, I need a headcount. Have we lost anyone?”  


Mrita crouched in the blood-spattered shell crater, Enthilde sat dazed at its rim, Maukan, Hetz, Guthro, and Aelim were knee-deep in mud down in the trench. They had everybody.  


“No casualties, ma’am,” Maukan reported, though that was overstating it.  


Around them, clusters of other soldiers pressed forward on the mopping-up operation, seemingly undisturbed, and Mrita could not for the life of her tell where they’d been.  


“Warp-sorcery,” Enthilde said. She put her rifle in the crook of her arm and made the sign of the Aquila.  


“Foulest sorcery,” Hetz replied. “The Emperor protects.”  


This was the Warp, yes. Mrita had heard it. Something vast and powerful had bled into this world, twisting reality to suit its whims, hiding an army and resurrecting the dead to chant blasphemous praises.  


She remembered another name. The Ruinous Powers, a former squadmate had called it, during the Tyranid invasions back home. To her knowledge the man had later been dismissed, maybe shot. But, he had known and feared what he’d spoken of, as had many of the soldiers huddling around the fire on that bleak, overcast night.  


The Ruinous Powers.  


The Warp.  


Chaos.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back! This story is on hiatus, but I will be posting old chapters that have already been published to Fanfiction.net. Enjoy!

As they prepared for their next offensive against the heretics, the bulk of the Eighth Pireans regrouped at Consik City and quartered in an old manufactorum complex, where the walls were pockmarked with bolter holes and a sagging roof contained the overpowering odor of mold. They were broken down into companies, further into platoons and squads, each unit having laid out its cots and lasguns and field packs in a designated territory on the production floor. From time to time Mrita saw the Eighth’s enginseers wandering between, prodding sadly at machines that hadn’t operated since this planet’s uprising three years before.

During a rest period she sat with Enthilde against an old hydraulic press. They had their rifles on a mat in front of them, in varying states of disassembly, and were carefully scraping the mud and grime off each individual piece. Mrita’s still bore the witch’s claw marks along the side, streaks millimeters deep ending in coils of excised metal. 

“So I’ve been asking around,” Enthilde spoke up, breaking a good ten minutes of silence. 

“Discreetly?” Mrita asked.

“Of course.”

There was no out-and-out rule against discussing the Ruinous Powers, per se, only because they didn’t officially exist. Heretics worshiped false gods and that was that. But the Imperial Creed, despite all the answers it claimed to have, couldn’t or wouldn’t explain what she’d seen in that shell crater, so Mrita looked elsewhere.

“I take it you found something, or you wouldn’t have brought this up.”

“I talked to Anna. She says there’s a guy who knows what we’re dealing with. A Mordian.”

Anna was their friend in the artillery company, though her main profession was contraband. The 12th Valhallans, another all-women regiment encamped down the road, made particularly good beers in their fuel-tank breweries, and the 117th Mordians, the Pireans’ neighbors in this sprawling manufactorum, represented a lucrative market. Anna’s job was to match supply with demand.

“I’m sure she has a price,” Mrita said.

“We continue to look the other way. Maybe carry a few kegs for her, in a pinch.”

“I’ll take it. Who’s the guy?”

***

The guy, as it turned out, was a gnarled old sergeant with an underbite and an augmetic eye. Somehow he’d survived many decades in the Emperor’s service, a good deal longer than the fifteen hours a typical guardsman could expect.

Mrita and Enthilde met him in Section 34-B, a derelict corner of the manufactorum, where Mechanicus savants used to splice together servitors. Blood still caked some of the operating tables. A few other delinquents hung around here, but they weren’t the type to eavesdrop. 

“So you’re curious, I hear,” the old man said. “Curious is a dangerous thing to be.”

He wore Mordian garb: a bright blue tunic trimmed with crimson, a brass Aquila pinned to his chest, a peaked cap bearing the number of his regiment—altogether flashy and useless. 

“We just want an explanation for the things we’ve seen,” Mrita said.

“Very well. I’ve deployed to fourteen planets in my day, and I’ve seen things, too.” He shook their hands. “My name’s Adek, at your service.”

“Mrita.”

“Enthilde.”

“Tell me what you saw.”

Mrita relayed the story, stone-faced, remembering all too clearly the sound of those voices speaking inside her head…

“You encountered a psyker.”

“Yes,” Mrita said. “A witch. They round those people up back home.”

“They round them up everywhere. Feed them to Him on Terra, they say, or something like that.”

“How do they… well… how do these people get their powers?”

“A psyker’s power is not his own. He’s more of a conduit, drawing energy from somewhere else.”

Mrita pursed her lips. “From the Warp, you mean.”

“Correct.”

She’d traveled through the Warp just once, during the flight here, and she’d spent the entirety of that trip deep within some transport’s cargo hold, safe except for the occasional bad dream. But she’d never forgotten that just outside the hull was a maelstrom of unknown peril, where the Emperor’s light was but a faint glimmer amid madness and damnation. 

“The Warp is more than you think it is,” Adek went on. “It’s not just a parallel realm for us to fly ships through—it has its own laws, governed by emotions, not physics, and its own pantheon, full of gods and demons.”

“Is that what the heretics worship?” Enthilde asked.

Adek nodded, the wrinkled corner of his mouth lifting in a trace smirk. “The very same. Four deities, each with his own domain and his own followers.”

“Praise the Four,” the Warp had told her, through the tongues of the dead. Mrita shivered. 

“Tell me about these gods,” she said, more quietly than before. Even those faint words seemed to echo off the rafters and chains hanging in the shadows overhead.

“There is only one god you need concern yourself with, guardsman.” Adek spoke in the tone of an Ecclesiarch or a commissar, handing down the Emperor’s judgment from on high, but a wry smile betrayed him. “Very well. You wish to know what the enemy believes, all the better to defeat them. I’ll tell you.”

He leaned in, and Mrita and Enthilde did the same. This meeting had become downright conspiratorial, now, and if the likes of Commissar Vant ever found out, their fates were sealed. 

“What the heretics believe is that their gods are the embodiments of human emotions. Pride and desire feed the Prince of Pleasure. Knowledge is the domain of the Changer of Ways, while hope and perseverance feed the Plague-Lord. Wrath, then, strengthens the Blood God, the Lord of Skulls, who sits atop the bones of all those slain in battle.”  
These were the strange names of strange gods, for whom people she couldn’t understand launched their blasphemous crusades. The world Mrita knew grew smaller and smaller. 

“But what do these gods give their followers?” Enthilde asked. “The Emperor protects. How can these Warp creatures offer anything greater?” 

Adek chuckled. The scars and wrinkles on his face formed a maze. 

“Shopping for gods, are we?” he said. “Comparing divinities like produce at a market stall?”

Enthilde shot him a glare, and thumped the faded Aquila painted across the breastplate of her armor. “My faith in the Emperor is pure. I merely wonder why anybody would abandon Him.”

“Men sell their souls to Chaos because it promises untold power, and, for the most zealous of them, it delivers.”

Chaos had given that witch the power to raise the dead. Mrita couldn’t say she’d ever seen anything comparable from the Emperor. 

Maybe He, supposedly “ascended,” was just as the heretics claimed, a corpse on the Golden Throne, and so there was no such thing as a kind, loving god who watched over His subjects. All that left room for, then, was Chaos. Madness and darkness.

“Such is the universe?” Mrita said, running her fingers over the scratches on her rifle. A sharp edge pricked her and drew a little bit of blood. 

“Such is the universe, according to heretics. I relay only what I have learned of their ideas, during my long campaigns against them, and you two are free to decide the truth for yourselves.”

“So you’re not telling us what to believe.” Enthilde narrowed her eyes, as if she’d encountered some particularly vulgar piece of graffiti scrawled on the side of a Leman Russ.

“It’s a small mind that delegates that decision to others.”

Chaos wouldn’t care what you thought, necessarily. It cared that you served it, fed its power, but unlike the Emperor, it didn’t demand endless devotion and unrewarded sacrifice. Mrita supposed it was a mercenary relationship, then, as opposed to the self-abasing worship of the Imperial Cult. The Chaos Gods accepted payment in depravity and mayhem and living souls. 

“All right,” she said. “I’ll believe that the Warp spawned these dark gods and sent them against the Imperium. Can they be defeated?”

“No.”

Mrita blinked. “No?”

“None of us will win this war, not with all the lasguns and chainswords the manufactorums will ever put out. You see, Mrita, every thought and feeling in a living soul feeds the Ruinous Powers, forms their very substance, and they have no shortage of food, not with so many trillions of people scattered across the galaxy. That is why they cannot be defeated—they are a reflection of our own selves.”

This was heresy. A capital offense, like the rest of this conversation, because the foundation of the Imperium’s struggle lay in its own confidence in the ultimate victory, and if the Emperor could not win, why fight in His name?

Mrita and Enthilde exchanged glances, saying nothing. They could turn Adek in, of course, but then it would inevitably come out that they had gone around asking about Chaos, and they’d be punished just as severely as the Mordian.

“Thank you for sharing this, Adek,” Mrita said. “We’ve... gotten what we came for.”

While Enthilde stared silently at Adek, her fists clenched, some mixture of hatred and confusion writ upon her face, Mrita grabbed her by the arm and led her away. 

“I appreciate our little talk,” the sergeant called out behind them. “And...”

Mrita turned. “And, what?”

He showed the same wry smile as before. “And, faithful guardsmen, walk in the Emperor’s light.”


End file.
